Clowning around

The Circus Scrap Book contains many articles on circus lore and function from the early twentieth century, including this piece on Circus Hoodoos (scroll down) from January 1929: ‘Old Van Amburg made barrels of money and prospered travelling through the country with Scriptural mottoes painted upon his wagons, but all that changed as soon as he employed a peg-legged cook. His ticket-wagon receipts at once fell off amazingly, there was bad luck in the ring, constant desertions from his company, and several valuable animals died.’ From page 22 of the pdf version of the issue, we find ‘How the Word “Freaks” Was Changed’:

”The uprising of the freaks occurred on Friday, January 6, 1898, when Dame Nature’s oddities in meeting, reached the conclusion that the word “freak” was opprobrious and without any special meaning, particularly so asa very large number of those who constituted this department are free from any peculiarities to designate them as different from the ordinary being and it was therefore determined that the word “freak” should be from this time on abolished and a committee was appointed to select another word in place of the objectionable one.’

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The Grafik magazine development tumblr. It seems ironic that in such an image-obsessed era, a magazine utterly at the heart of aesthetic culture is unable to survive. Our collective lack of desire to actually physically invest in the things we all study, swap, post, favourite and like serves to perpetuate the idea that contemporary visual culture is in some way rather superficial and fickle / I heart camera, a weblog about photography / Revision Peripherique, an exhibition / Someday you will be loved, a tumblr / paintings by Kelly Reemtsen (above).

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Sou Fujimoto’s House H feels akin to the labyrinth in The Name of the Rose, a shell into which the wooden structures of life and movement have been almost crudely inserted / Zaha Hadid’s new Roca London gallery is not for the trypophobic (a condition/word that has a remarkably short gestation, does not describe a recognised condition, and indeed may even be self-perpetuating in that its description and accompanying images trigger the phobia in those who might not otherwise have ever thought about it.